TIM KENNEDY | Scars and Stripes (Ep. 316)

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1:17 This is Undaunted Life of Man's Podcast. I'm your host Kyle Thompson. Let's get into it!

1:22 Hi guys, you have asked for a very, very long time for me to get this guy on the show, but we finally made it happen.

1:27 Guys, Tim Kennedy is our guest for today. He is a green beret, a sniper, and a retired MMA fighter who fought with a UFC and in strike force.

1:35 And he's also, I bet you didn't know this, the three-time all-army combatives champion, not a shock if you know anything about this guy,

1:41 but he also starred in the history channels, Hunting Hitler, and Discovery channels, Hard to Kill. And today, Tim owns a tactical training company called Sheepdog Response.

1:49 A lot of you guys have followed them and some of the stuff that they do. You've gone to some of their courses. It's really, really an awesome company.

1:54 But he's also the author of a brand new book, which is out this week, if you're listening to this on time, and it's called Scars and Stripes,

1:59 an unapologetically American story of fighting the Taliban, UFC warriors, and myself.

2:05 And unfortunately, in the interview, I think my voice cracked as I was saying the title, but it's a great title.

2:08 I mean, Scars and Stripes, what an amazing, amazing title of a book. But in this interview, I just got to tell you, you need to think of this interview as a part one,

2:17 because we're going to have him back on at some point this summer and we're going to get into a lot of other things because basically we didn't touch on any of the stuff he's doing today.

2:24 We didn't touch on Save Our Allies. We didn't touch on any of the television stuff on Sheepdog Response, on Jiu Jitsu.

2:29 We basically didn't talk about any of it. Today, we just spent a lot of our time talking about, you know, running through the book, his upbringing, what it was like,

2:35 and kind of how he got into martial arts, and then why he ended up going to the Army, and some of the really crazy circumstances that he put himself is in,

2:42 because the thing about this book, because we do talk about, you know, some of the stuff that he did as a green beret, we talk about some of the MMA fighting and how he got from Strike Force to the UFC and all that kind of stuff.

2:51 But this is one of the most refreshing autobiographies I've read in a very, very long time, because he doesn't try to make himself come off looking clean in every scenario.

2:59 There were a lot of mistakes that this guy made. A lot of mistakes that he's had to pay for dearly, but he was able to talk about the grace he was able to experience in a lot of these scenarios whenever he didn't deserve it.

3:11 And so you read some people's autobiographies and it's just like, man, this person's amazing. They're always squared away. It's like that person on Instagram that's, you know, their makeup's always ready to go and their kids are always perfect and, you know, the guy's always ripped and always, you know, looking good at the perfect angle and you think of these people like, oh, man, I wish my life was like that.

3:27 But their real life is way different than that. So I thought it was great and really, you know, admirable of Tim to basically go as hard as he did on this autobiography to describe the real life scenarios that he put himself in in some of the amazing outcomes that he saw.

3:40 But again, we're not going to get into everything. So if you're wondering about certain MMA fights and all that, guys, we're going to get in that into the next podcast in the next podcast.

3:48 We're going to talk about current events. We're going to talk about all the stuff going on with Afghanistan, Ukraine. We're going to get into all of it, but just enjoy today for what it is.

3:54 Guys, I had a really, really great time with Tim, and I'm not going to keep him from you any longer. So without further ado, let's get into it.

4:00 Tim Kennedy, welcome to Undaunted Life of Man's podcast.

4:03 Greetings. Hello.

4:05 Hey, I'm so excited for this. And so is my audience, but I do have to give a little bit of a PSA that if somebody hears during any point during the next, you know, hour or so if you hear a woman screaming or gunshots, as you can see, if you're watching this on YouTube or rumble, what kind of class do you have going on right there?

4:20 It's an active shooter class. Yeah, it's called a TTRC. It's a tactical trauma response course. So it's like, how to do medicine in both an austere environment and in like a tactical situation, you know, school shooting, church shooting.

4:33 So it is, it is a high level TCCC course with the tactics that that we'd expect from somebody being in a dangerous place.

4:42 So guys, I can confirm for you. He is in his office. He's not in some sort of dungeon somewhere. There's no one that's actually being tortured as far as we know, because I'm not in the same room. So I can't confirm nor deny.

4:52 Now, I will tell you this from the top, Tim.

4:54 I don't typically begin an interview going right into the book that the person wrote. I'm typically, you're reaching out to authors and that's who I'm talking to.

5:01 But I think this interview warrants an exception because if you're listening to this on time, that means that the book that you wrote a co-wrote with Nick Palmishano is out today.

5:09 Okay. So it is your autobiography. I really appreciate you and your team, especially Sarah Verardo. What an awesome lady. Thank you so much for shooting this over to me.

5:16 It's called scars and stripes best book name ever and unapologetically American story of fighting the Taliban, UFC warriors and myself.

5:24 So this book is literally a front to back rundown of your life. Okay. So it starts in childhood, goes through your MMA career, your military career, all the stuff that you're doing now and kind of like tease you up for some of the stuff you're even going to be doing here in the next few weeks.

5:36 So if it's good with you, we'll just stick with the book to start out. But the very, very first words of the book are this.

5:42 My name is Tim Kennedy and I have a problem. I only feel alive when I'm about to die. And so it's like, okay, that's a great way to kick off a book.

5:49 But I guess to generically start somewhere. Why even write an autobiography and also why do you seemingly have no regard for making sure that you come off looking like a perfect gentleman or hero in every story?

6:01 Because I got to tell you some of the stories in this book, I'm like, man, Tim's kind of a jerk, or I don't know if Tim would be my buddy.

6:07 Like it is a very unapologetic look at your life. So take me through it.

6:11 Yeah. So that, I mean, that was the goal, right? There's so many books out there right now that people, they get to craft their own story and tell the story through their lens.

6:22 And, you know, if they can, they can color it and they can add rose colored glasses to it.

6:27 And I think that's such a disservice. Having been in the limelight from the UFC, the TV shows on Discovery Channel, History Channel, you know, there's lots of people feel like they've been carried on the ride with me through a lot of my life and the experiences.

6:42 But they don't have context, right? They don't have the experiences. They don't get to see me being a terrible human and making lots of mistakes.

6:50 And those mistakes are important. And those in an Instagram world and Snapchat TikTok world that we live in now, you just have these like crescendo apogee moments, right? You have the climax of the summit, but you never see the crotch rot.

7:06 You never see the trench feet. You never see the rash on the armpits. You know, you don't see those pictures. But like, that's part of the process.

7:14 You don't see the time that you failed where you rolled your ankle and you didn't make the summit.

7:21 So I took a totally different approach because I truly believe that that growth happens because of failure.

7:29 And how can you write a book about growth and then not include failure?

7:35 And there's lots of different forms of failure in this book, I think I might might have the corner position on failure.

7:46 You've got some unique points of failure and we'll get into some of that. But you're right. I know at the very, very into your book, no spoiler alert here.

7:52 You talk about failure and that's how you can create that resilience and be able to overcome things.

7:56 And I guess this is a great point to mission as well, that you get into a lot of detail and into a lot of stories in this book.

8:02 And there's absolutely no way that we're going to able to get into all that here today. Maybe we can do that in your return appearance.

8:07 We'll get into a little bit more, but we're going to be skipping over a lot of stuff, which just means you guys have to go and pick up your own copy of scars and stripes.

8:13 We'll be in the show notes. Make sure that you check that out. But just to kind of get an idea of who you were and kind of, you know, foundationally how you were able to come to who you are today.

8:21 Give us an idea of what you and your family were like growing up and kind of what was that like, you know, dad, mom, Christian household, you and two siblings go.

8:29 Yeah, the, I mean, it sounds like the cookie cutter, right? Like nuclear family. I have a dad that loves me, a mom that loves me.

8:36 I have a big brother, a little sister, both high functioning siblings with two very high functioning parents.

8:44 But then like, like all things, if you, if you take down, like keep keeping up with the Jones's type and you just go one layer deep of this onion, you find some pretty compelling wild layers.

8:59 So my dad was an narcotics officer and an undercover police officer my whole entire life.

9:04 You know, I remember him coming home in a wife beater tank top stained with vomit and blood and he had poured beer on him.

9:11 He had like cigarette burns and he's like, I just bought a bunch of meth. You know, that's pretty cool.

9:17 And then other days he comes home in a Hawaiian shirt and driving a Lamborghini or a purple Porsche.

9:23 And I was like, what is going on? We had a red phone in the closet and I pick up the phone and a dude in like a Medallion Columbia accent.

9:31 Speaking Spanish, you know, is like, like is your dad home? And, you know, we had curated responses to, to, to make sure that his cover was, was layered.

9:44 And, you know, being an eight year old kid and having your dad tell you to sneak into a parking garage to steal stuff out of a glove box because he couldn't get a warrant, but he wanted to know who owned this vehicle.

9:55 Having a dad that stole planes full of cocaine from Pablo Escobar when you're when you're a teenager.

10:01 All the while central coast. I don't know why. I want to have ideas.

10:07 If you've read some Frank Pretti books, maybe be online with me, but that central coast ended up being a hub of serial killers.

10:17 And a couple of them were hunting young women while I was like growing up.

10:23 And we had an insane asylum in a Tascadero, California.

10:27 A couple of the Manson murderers were housed in the prison in San Luis Obispo.

10:33 So as beautiful of a place as it was and all the gorgeousness that the central coast is.

10:39 I had a weird, I had a weird lens that I viewed this whole entire world through.

10:44 You know, it was a violent, you know, my dad walking through the door of MP five and blood all over his legs as he's walking to the shower to clean off hoping that none of us saw him.

10:52 So it was an extraordinary, atypical childhood that was the framework for, you know, kind of who myself and my siblings became, you know, and I'm not special because the rest of my family is pretty extraordinary.

11:09 So do you feel like, do you feel like that's more of a nature nurture type thing?

11:13 Like, do you feel like if your dad was somebody else and maybe if you weren't exposed to those things, that maybe you wouldn't have been attracted to some of the routes you went down.

11:19 So like the military route or the fighting route, or do you feel like that was just in you? You were wired for that.

11:24 It's a combination of both, you know, like the uncles that went to Vietnam, you know, my grandpa, greatest generation, you know, working on bombers, dropping bombs on Nazis, like, generationally and genetically, there's without a doubt, high-level performers with lots of people

11:44 doing extraordinary things. So that's on the nature side, on the nurture side, you know, being in a conducive environment where doing extraordinary, wildly dangerous things were commonplace on the nurture side, it was definitely reinforced.

12:00 Yeah, I think that that's an important distinction because a lot of people think that they're wired for a certain thing, but depending upon where you were born to the family that you were born into, you may not end up going the route that you want to go.

12:10 Another thing that was interesting about upbringing, I can't remember if you mentioned it or not, but you were homeschooled, and so that's not, especially in the time that you were being homeschooled, that wasn't as popular as say that it is today and becoming more so every year that we see the stuff going on in the public schools.

12:22 But at a pretty early age, your father got you into martial arts, and so that's wrestling and boxing, and I think there was even a little bit of Japanese jujitsu sprinkled in there as well.

12:31 So did you take to that, like, like a duck to water, or was there a little bit of resistance there, because I guess that comes back to wiring a little bit as well?

12:38 Yeah, there's almost no resistance. I loved it. I bounced. There was, and this ends up being a reoccurring problem is there was a lack of commitment, there was lack of humility, and there was like this entitled approach to it, right, whether it was showed up on karate or, you know, tae kwon doe, and then ultimately tae kariyaki a jiu jitsu, which was like the first form of jiu jitsu.

13:07 A little bit of wrestling, you know, and I fancy myself to be this really great thing in this time, like the big fish in this tiny, tiny little pond.

13:16 You know, we're at like a studio with 10 other martial artists and cool, you're the best one, and you're living in a tascadero population 26,000, and you got the only tae kwon doe jim in the whole entire city.

13:27 But you're the good one there. So of course, I'm like, the best.

13:30 Yeah, of course. And that, so there's like a lack of commitment and a lack of humility is as I kept, you know, kind of hopping from one place to another, until ultimately, Matt Smith or Chuck Liddell just like mops the mats with me.

13:45 Yeah, I think that that was an interesting thing because I remember you having like a hatred for Jake Shields, because he kind of peeled the veil back a little bit on how good you were based on the people that you were around and you and I were talking about off air that you live in central

13:58 Texas right now, which three years ago was not the center point of the jujitsu universe and almost immediately is becoming the center point of jujitsu universe but you really were on the cutting edge of mixed martial arts because when you began, you began this brand new sport in the 90s.

14:12 You know, you're doing amateur fights, you actually went 30 and one as an amateur, but in 1999, as you mentioned, you know, you ran into some guys that had a gym called the pit.

14:20 Some guys that, you know, Chuck Liddell, Jake Shields, Jack Hackleman or John Hackleman rather, and I want to read this quote from the book here because I thought it was funny, but this is clearly not a dojo and not a place to learn life lessons.

14:30 This is a fight house. Welcome to the MMA world of the late 90s. There's no coaching science or structure. Everyone just beat each other up in the toughest guys make it.

14:39 And so I got to say for me, just being a fan because I remember my dad taking me to Hastings and us getting the VHS as of UFC one and two and then watching some K one and some pride fights back in the day.

14:49 I always feel a little bit weird when people talk about, you know, guys that started that early is like, oh, they wouldn't be so successful today. It's like, they didn't know anything. It was just like you went there to survive.

14:59 So kind of take me through finding the pit and finding that team because they didn't just welcome you in with open arms from the very beginning. You kind of had earned your spot.

15:07 Yeah. And, you know, I never felt like I earned it for a long time. You know, so when Jake Shields came, you know, he, this was pre Google, right? This is, you couldn't, and you couldn't just find a jujitsu gym.

15:23 So you would buy word of mouth, try, try and find a place that you could go and train where you could just find bodies, anybody, whether it was, you know, a kickboxing place, a, like, I walk into a kung fu place to try to work on striking.

15:38 This is like early dark days where, you know, like, it wasn't even fighting the Indian reservations yet because Indian reservations didn't even understand what they could do yet like we're fighting in cardboard rope ringed places.

15:53 But when Jake came in, you know, it wasn't like I was angry at him. I was embarrassed. I was, it was like shame that I thought I was like the big dog in this again, the big fish in a little tiny pond.

16:04 And then just like this super cool, you know, kind of Northern, Northern California Valley guy just murders me. I was like, who is this?

16:15 And I'm going to go to wherever he's at, and I'm going to try and be as good as they are. And then I walk into slow kickboxing where they did a lot of their sparring.

16:25 And in there were, were three different news that we're currently fighting for the UFC. And one that was fighting for pride and, and then, I mean, probably 15 other at the time, really high level mixed martial artists.

16:42 But this is before mixed martial arts was a thing. So the pit was so far ahead of everybody back then, because you had wrestlers, you had jujitsu practitioners.

16:54 You had high level strikers, you know, coming from that Hawaiian Kempo background with John Hackleman. So you had like, obviously the famous Chuck Liddell style of heavy hands, great wrestling, you know, unbeknownst to most people, there's a very high level of jujitsu in that gym.

17:15 Like everybody was good. So this was a typical for the 90s in what we now know as MMA, but back then it was just fighting. And, you know, it was usually be like a karate guy versus a jujitsu guy or a boxer versus a kickboxer.

17:33 And then, and then the sport evolved and everybody started being good at everything.

17:38 Well, since you were there from the very beginning, I'm curious from your perspective. When did you feel like it started to change? Because obviously everyone used to say about Chuck Liddell. Yeah, heavy handed boxer, but he kind of wrestles in reverse.

17:48 Like he's going to make you either pay for a takedown, or you're going to be so scared of shooting that you won't try and take him down. So Chuck wasn't out there shooting double legs and trying to, you know, run the pipe on a single or something like that.

17:58 When do you feel like it really started to turn where it's like, no, no, no, I know we haven't been training these things our whole life, but you have to train everything and you have to be at least proficient at everything.

18:13 It was kind of the initial surge of Brazilian fighters into MMA, you know, the Van der Le Silva's and the Muril of Bustamante's. These were black belts in jujitsu that would happily be on the ground, you know, the Mario Sugar and Ruas and Ninja Ruas.

18:36 And again, black belts that would strangle you and happily like, for Van der Le Silva, his nickname was the X murder. So, you know, he would knee you and elbow elbow you into oblivion loved fighting bare knuckle love soccer kicks and stomps.

18:53 And when they came onto the scene and you know hoist Gracie obviously introducing jujitsu in such a dominant way in those early UFC's, you know, there can't be a question that this this has to be respected art.

19:07 But what they are missing as you're like as you look at the jujitsu lineup of, you know, the Gracie brothers.

19:16 Most of them were kind of petite framed men, you know, they then you have like the chocolate delves and the Scott Adams and the Gannemagies, the Matt Hughes, where you started getting the American level athletes learning what was supposed to be this like protected

19:36 art. So they would bring our wrestling would bring our our heavy hands are striking. And I can learn how to choke you. And when those two things started colliding the bleed over and the skill creep really began.

19:52 Yeah, I remember when I talked to Hickson on the show, I think it was last year we were we were talking a little bit about why hoist and not him at those first UFC's and different things like that and a lot of people thought it was because because Hickson looked really good with a shirt off right.

20:05 He looked like a real well built guys a little bit of a bigger guy, whereas hoist look like he should be, you know, teaching yoga in the park, or, you know, second grade or something like that and it was just a little bit of a different style for that obviously.

20:14 One thing that I want to get into as well because, again, there's so many great stories in the book, but this one stuck out to me because of how you ended it. You ended this story with a quote that I think will kind of give people an idea to the springboard for you because you didn't always know you would do MMA professionally.

20:27 It was just something that you did because you thought it was fun. But here's the quote. I think the I like to think my path to the UFC began at Mardi Gras as an 18 year old.

20:36 Okay, so most 18 year olds, Tim, I don't know if you know this, they don't find their way to New Orleans for Mardi Gras to begin with, but you can point back to that one moment and say, you know what, I eventually made myself to be at one of the top fighters in the 185 pound division

20:50 in the UFC because of that moment so I know we don't have all day for the story but I teeted up for you so give it to us.

20:56 So I was working for a company called Knox Industries, and Knox Industries, Gary Cobble, had asked me to drive his company SUV, which is this Escalade, from California to New Orleans, where this event called Trexpo East, which was a law enforcement and military-only

21:21 convention was going on. So I get in his car with about a half a million dollars in experimental weapons, and a normal person would plan for rest and maybe they're going to sleep in New Mexico and then they're going to sleep in Texas.

21:40 You know, I went and bought like Gatorade bottles with the big open mouths so I could pee while I drove, and I would just do a straight shot so I could get to New Orleans early and experience Mardi Gras.

21:55 Getting there on Bourbon Street and parking on Royal Street, literally parking a half a million dollars of experimental prototype weapons in the back of an SUV. I just started kind of cruising around New Orleans, learning my way, and I end up in a bar and I see a guy with chunky ears that clearly was manipulating

22:17 some tourists into fighting, and I was like, "Well, this looks awesome. This looks like a job for me." I go over and after his second go, I decided to inject myself into what he was doing, which was grabbing tourists, bringing him down to a local bar and doing a bare knuckle fight in the basement, and he was charging tickets and selling drinks.

22:41 So I was able to weasel my way into a few bare knuckle fights in New Orleans by a few. I honestly don't remember how many times I fought that night.

22:53 I remember I was making a few hundred dollars of fights and I showed up to work on Monday after I fought all through the weekend with a few thousand dollars in my pocket, and I got to meet a couple of cool people, and the bartender, this cute girl, kind of let me crash in her couch.

23:12 But as a kid, I'm a child, an 18-year-old, and she's like a New Orleans bartender. I definitely took my best shots, but there was zero chance that anything.

23:23 I always wonder what happened to some of these people that were on the outskirts of my life that saw this psychopath just doing insane things.

23:34 So I did a variety of bare knuckle fights in New Orleans over Mardi Gras, and liked the experience of getting paid in cash and smelling cigarette smoke and vomit and old booze, as I was fighting on a concrete floor.

23:52 And unless you've been to Louisiana and you've been in, whether they call it a root cellar, or you can't really call it a basement because in Louisiana, everything's wet, and New Orleans is below sea level.

24:07 And so when you walk down a staircase in a bar in New Orleans, the smell of mold and mud and swamp is indescribable, and above you is a bar where the pheromones and drinking and all the behaviors and the evils that go on in Mardi Gras, and all of those things mixing with blood and testosterone and violence.

24:34 It's a, it's a wild, it was a wild few nights.

24:38 Well, it's such a funny story because you get into so much detail and it's incredibly well written how you describe it, because it's like you could almost feel us being there because like you described even your hands because if you do a bunch of bare knuckle fights over a weekend, your hands are going to be absolutely torn up.

24:51 Your knuckles are going to all be torn up so we completely understand that, but I do want to get into something that you kind of teed up from the beginning, which is, you know, talking about your mistakes being very, very open about that.

25:00 But while you were still very young, you went through, I guess what we could call a rough patch.

25:04 So broke up with your girlfriend, but then you slept with another girl a day later, and both of them informed you sooner after that each of them were pregnant.

25:12 Okay, so you ended up having two daughters that were about 19 days apart. Also around this time, you were a part of an orgy after one of your fights, right with a ring girl and some other folks.

25:22 And later one of those girls informed you that she was HIV positive, and she had HIV before the two of you had, you know, had passionate love with one another.

25:30 And then all of this angst and pressure and drama caused you at one point to have a little bit of a breakdown, you even strip naked at one point and decided you were going to swim out into the ocean.

25:39 But without really any idea of where you were going to end up or what you would do once you got there, you had to be rescued by the Coast Guard guys, I'm giving short shrift to all this just so we can move this along.

25:48 But getting through all that, Tim, you realize that you have a bit of a second chance because you're alive.

25:54 And so you feel like this deep down hey there's something required of me right now because I'm not six feet under, and a week later you get a call from an army recruiter.

26:02 And so to back up about 18 months before all this, you know, basically 911 happens.

26:08 You go see recruiters almost immediately for the army, the Navy and the Marine Corps if my memory serves me correct.

26:13 And then there's a tremendous backlog of candidates at that point because there were so many people doing what you were doing.

26:17 But the army recruiter called you, you know, a year and a half later to talk to you about a brand new program called 18 x Ray. So this was a fast track way of joining the special forces or the green brace.

26:27 So pretty soon you're headed to the army. So take us through all that. I know that that's a lot of ground to cover with, you know, kind of this attack of conscience and attack of meaning in your life.

26:36 And then all of a sudden you're on this, you're in this brand new program and going to be, you know, member special forces. What was that like?

26:43 I mean, now looking back, it's a lot, you know, a lot of shame and a lot of regret and a lot of, and a lot of grace. You know, like that's a, yeah, I don't talk about it a lot in the book.

26:56 You know, but that if, if you look at like one level removed from the black and white of those pages, all you see is grace over and over and over and over again grace for my family.

27:06 Grace from my daughter's mom's grace from, you know, the church who still helped and supported me grace from the army. That's not something that you'd see very often.

27:17 You know, I have two daughters that had try care benefits as they're growing up and like how extraordinary as much smacks we can talk about the government is pretty amazing being an enlisted, lower enlisted, you know, e4.

27:35 When I went into the military and being able to have insurance for my daughters, like that's, that's amazing. Yeah. Yeah, it's amazing.

27:43 And so while I'm in the process of continuing continuing to make bad decisions over and over again, you know, hopping in the Pacific Ocean and doing swimming to West and the fog.

27:54 And, you know, ultimately being plucked out.

27:59 You know, there's, there's some implied things there that it wasn't like literally being rescued.

28:07 But I'm still swimming right like my head still above water and there is like this reoccurring.

28:15 Persistence, this, this inability to quit or give up that you see this nonstop throughout the story where it didn't matter what the adversary was or what the difficulty is that I'm trying to overcome.

28:34 I'm still like trying to swim. I'm still trying to move forward.

28:39 And not always in the right direction and definitely with plenty of mistakes, but this I'm not going to go into the water.

28:48 Certainly. And that's something you mentioned in the book as well. Just when you look back on your life and you're connecting the dots going backwards, you can see God's hand and his grace when you and all these different moments because you got a lot of things that you didn't deserve, right?

29:00 And you would be the first one to say that you spend 400 plus pages admitting as much, right? But I think that that's important to kind of hear from someone like you because, you know, a lot of people look up to you and some of the things that you've been able to do.

29:10 But to be able to be so forth, right? I don't know if I said it from the top, but it's very refreshing to read an autobiography like this.

29:16 That is astoundingly accurate about the things that went on in your life that that shouldn't have gone on the good things that shouldn't have happened and the bad things that you did to yourself.

29:24 But, you know, let's go and kind of hop back into, you know, the process you become in a green berry. And, you know, for today's show, there's so many great stories in the book about the process, you becoming a green berry.

29:33 I don't want to steal that from the reader. So I want you guys to go ahead and make sure you read that for yourselves. Pick up the book. Have I sold the book enough in this podcast? I'm going to keep doing it, [inaudible].

29:40 So you don't have to do it, you know, they're going to buy it anyway. By the time they hear this, they probably will have already listened to half of it.

29:46 But I do want to fast forward to March 13th of 2006. So you're on your way to your first combat deployment. Okay, so we are at war, you're going to combat, you're going to Iraq.

29:55 But you bypass the normal ODA that's operational detachment alpha and go straight to something called CIF, which is not something that I was familiar with before I read your book and that's combatant commanders in extremis force.

30:06 Okay. And so briefly, give our listeners an idea of what CIF is, and then how'd you end up in that group. But also, you're going to have to tell us a story about how you had to end up fighting your entire CIF team because you're running your mouth.

30:19 So go for it.

30:20 Yeah, the, so the CIF is a special operations unit within special forces after you've been on a special forces ODA for a few years and you've become senior, you know, you've kind of cut your teeth, you've earned a couple more stripes.

30:36 Then you're eligible to go and try out and you go, you attend this school, the school called Sephartec. And it is a hostage rescue counter terrorism type course and it has a very, you know, very, very high attrition.

30:53 And if you finish that course, then you're able to go and try out to be on the CIF.

30:59 If they accept you into the CIF, then you get put on a troop, you know, within a squadron, you have two troops and then you start that process of attending schools and then going to combat in this kind of rotational process.

31:20 I don't know how I skipped what should have been, you know, four to six years of formative years, like, of learning how special forces worked of how the military worked.

31:34 They just kind of picked me and brought me into that world to get ready to go on that first combat deployment, which was to go find Zarkawi. And so I was, I was one of the first 18 x rays to go there and the first guy to ever jump what is a normal process.

31:55 My team Sergeant John McPhee was kind of tracking me and knew of me from fighting and my performance, some of my performance, and they end up on a little bit of grace and a little bit of a mistake on the on the CIF heading to Iraq to go hunt the number one bad guy in Iraq.

32:16 Absolutely. And your teen up what I wanted to talk about next and I'm glad I heard you say CIF because I've been saying CIF in my head the entire time looking like an idiot so sift is where you go to turn in all of your stuff.

32:28 Oh, God, all the better. I'm going to be like, guys, this guy's freaking sucks guys I'm sorry, like I'm a civilian. What can you say, you know, give me a little bit of grace. How about that.

32:37 The one thing that you did point out in the book that you don't have to refer to at all but you talked about the number of years of experience that average ODA's were losing by kind of doing this new way of getting guys to work more quickly and all that.

32:49 And so I thought that was interesting when he talked about in the book, but during your time there you were trying to kill Zarkawi. He's the godfather of Isis he was a leader of AQI Al Qaeda in Iraq at the time.

32:59 But during this time you get your first combat kill so I want to read a quote from the book here.

33:03 I thought this would be a bigger moment. I thought it would have gravitas. It doesn't. He was a bad man. He tried to kill us. Now he is dead. It is simple for me.

33:12 What isn't simple is hearing his wife's screams when the shots ring out. There is no sound like the sound of a woman seeing her husband die. It rattles me and lingers.

33:21 Now Tim I'm assuming you meant that that lingers to today because I've talked to other veterans who have been in very similar situations and it certainly lingers with them in that way. But talk me through that a little bit because the majority of the audience you're talking to today

33:33 has never been on the right side of a bullet. They've never been the person that took another life. They've never had to put themselves in that position or chose to put themselves in that position.

33:42 So that's not a normal thing that most of us ever have to really deal with. So talk through what that was like and how you were kind of surprised by your reaction.

33:49 The process, the act of shooting somebody in the ROE, your rules of engagement, it was really straightforward. We're hitting a known bad guy's house. We have a military age man that is not responding to the call out.

34:06 He's grabbing an AK. It's pretty black and white here, which unfortunately is not normal. Normally it's a lot of different shades of gray.

34:19 And taking a selector switch from safe to fire and getting a good side picture. And there was odd. There was no tunnel vision.

34:30 And even with the red dots, I could see the red dot and I could see him and I could see the rest of my team and I could literally see everything that was happening around me.

34:40 And I could hear everything. I could smell everything. And so the process of bad guy, the conscious decision of this guy is now a threat.

34:50 He is now crossed the clear ROE requirement. And he's in the motion of an act that could kill me in the rest of my team.

35:01 The choke point of a doorway is a very dangerous moment where you don't stop and where violence has to be quick and decisive. Speed, surprise and violence of action is what you're trying to do always. But there is definitely a degree of a high level of execution at a doorway in that choke point in that funnel.

35:26 But then once that decision is made and you press the trigger, you feel the wall, you press through it, you move back forward, feel that reset, you feel the recoil, you can smell the gun power that's burning, you know, mixed with the curry and the clove and all the things in this different weird world

35:45 that I've never been to the Middle East. And I'd never been to Iraq. And it's wild how the brain remembers all of those details.

36:00 But then also amidst others, which was fun in this book was going back through and cooperating so much of all of this, you know, on my ODA, I went back and talked to Ben Rios and Dave Fredricks and trying to get as best as I could, what it looked like from their perspectives as this was happening.

36:24 And then, you know, after the shots ring out, you know, adrenaline is a wild drug because it slows everything down. And even being able to remember the reset of the trigger and the recoil of the rifle and seeing the sights settle again so I could press again.

36:38 And at the end, having a tiny little shot group that was done by two or three guys all at the same time, three dudes shooting all at the same time and still having bullets stacked on top of each other. But then, you ever do slow motion on your phone?

36:56 Sure. You know, like it starts in regular speed, and then it goes to slow motion. And then it goes back to regular speed. That's how my brain remembers some of these moments. I remember like approaching, I remember the interpreter yelling at this guy to get on the ground, get on the ground, show me your hands, show me your hands.

37:14 And that's all in real time. And then he moves to grab a rifle. And I can see the rifle from my side of the doorway and hallway. And then everything slows down.

37:26 And then the shots ring out. He falls to the ground. And then it goes back to regular time as we just effortlessly move through this whole entire building.

37:35 But I can also remember the screams like a scream in slow motion would be like, like you remember this piercing scream of a wife hearing and seeing her husband die. It's a different scream.

37:48 And it's a scream in real time as the world spins back up and goes into kind of the normal go time of an assault force. So it's wild.

38:00 Well, I mean, you're experiencing what I've read about in Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman's books on killing and on combat where there's, you know, auditory exclusion things kind of go down.

38:09 You know, he's talks about how, you know, law enforcement officers and military folks, whenever they get into, you know, a live fire at, you know, act at some point in their career.

38:17 Sometimes they'll be their pants or some other things will kind of happen to their bodies is because everything is causing their body to focus in that moment.

38:24 So I've never thought about it in terms of like slow motion, right, because that's exactly what it is. You get the fast motion so you can kind of orient yourself to the video that you're shooting and then it pops you right back out.

38:33 So that that really does make a lot of sense. Now, one thing that you spend a lot of time talking about in the book, really, it's, it's a huge section of the book.

38:39 It deals with a resupply mission that you were on because you were taking a year's worth of supplies to forward operating base anaconda. So FOB Anaconda is located in the heart of his er, er, er, Rosen.

38:52 Okay, there you go. So that's a province where it's mostly Taliban. Right. It's a Taliban centric province in Afghanistan. And without getting into all the details because we don't have all day.

39:01 It was essentially impossible to get all the supplies to that FOB aside from driving it in with trucks, you know, dropping it in or flying it in. It wasn't really going to work out.

39:09 But you guys get ambushed along the way. So I'm going to read a quote from the book here.

39:13 It's one thing to kill a man who is actively shooting at you, or even to shoot a leader responsible for atrocities. I never lost any sleep about those shots.

39:21 But these shots were awful. There was no satisfaction. There was no rush of knowing you quieted the gun that was hunting for American lives. There was just killing.

39:29 With every trigger pull, I lost a little bit more of my soul. But the target calls kept coming from the RG and I had a responsibility to keep my team safe.

39:37 Now also, Tim, during the fighting, you did something that you thought was amazing, but it turned out not really to be so. So you talked about how, you know, even though you're an incredibly gifted athlete, you're not a gifted thrower.

39:48 And I know a couple of guys like that in my life, they can do anything except throw something or hit something with a bat. It's absolutely incredible.

39:54 But you managed to laser a grenade into a window from a fairly, you know, far off distance.

40:00 And you threw it into the window of a building that you thought was full of enemy combatants. So I'll read this quote here and then we'll get your feedback.

40:06 A grenade going off in the movies is very different from what happens in real life. It's not this giant fireball. It's not dramatic. It's a hollow thud. It's that late night sound of opening the refrigerator to see what's in there and the watermelon rolls out and hits the ground.

40:19 That's all a grenade is after you throw it. A little hollow pop. And after you hear that pop, you either want to hear nothing or you want to hear men screaming. You do not want to hear women and children scream.

40:30 You absolutely do not want to hear that. Yet, that's what I heard. So FOB Anaconda, work your way all the way up to throwing that grenade. Take us through it.

40:40 Man, yeah, two horrible moments. So from the time the ambush was initiated, we had, I don't know, five hours of light. And it was absolute complete chaos anarchy. That is war.

40:58 The vehicle in front of me explodes. Everybody in it. Almost everybody in it immediately dies. A couple of people lived for a little while.

41:07 And that was the beginning of what was a three day gunfight as the vehicle that I'm in starts backing up to get the vehicle that just exploded off of our hood.

41:17 As we back up a hill, we see a few more bodies that are alive inside of this vehicle.

41:24 The driver, Mike Irish, jumps out and runs down to the vehicle. I begrudgingly go along with them. When we get down and we're trying to drag these bodies out, the Taliban assault force, which were most Iranian, mostly Iranian foreign fighters.

41:38 They, they go to assault across the 50 cal that Mike Keller shooting just vaporizes these guys that are not but 10, 10, 15 meters from me. You know, and this is all in like 90 seconds. And we still have, you know, I'm going to guess four hours of light.

41:57 As we fight for four hours. And not like moments of fight. This is non stop shooting in every direction as you see a muzzle flash and you see a new machine gun position that was already set.

42:14 And they start with their PPM and just pinning you down and nailing you. And maybe we start returning fire and that machine gun then skirts to another position as another machine gun nests open up. You know, this is just non stop ongoing as we are just getting hammered.

42:30 After a couple of days of that. We make our way into the village, but at night, once it got dark. The Taliban didn't have a lot of night vision and they definitely didn't have thermal. Our crow system did have thermal.

42:46 And of course I had night vision with a laser on my rifle. So I would position myself at the base of the crow system and the crow system would use the thermal imaging to then lays and identify target in a threat.

43:03 I would very judiciously. If it had a heat signature, I would plug some rounds in it. You know, in the book I equate this to the plungers of the Spartans and the Romans.

43:17 You know, you have like the shield wall on the shield wall moves forward. And they step over these bodies that are not quite yet dead and behind the shield wall, you have a guy with a spear that would just plunge these bodies as they moved forward.

43:31 It's a very thankless job, but you have to have that guy because these guys on the ground will happily roll over and take off an ankle if they can.

43:41 You know, they'll crawl their way back. They may not even be totally dead yet. Right. Maybe they're just like stabbed through the arm. They fall down spear shield wall moves past them.

43:52 And then they just stab a guy in the back like you have you have to do this because of our limited resources are limited ammo and we definitely weren't going to be using, you know, our, our grenade launcher with which was our most precious precious resource at the time.

44:09 And we'll just use a couple of M one one a LR 175 grain 762 by 51 bullets. And, and that, that task fell on me.

44:20 And there is nothing worse than laying there and in darkness.

44:24 You know, listening to a call of, all right, here's another one. Okay, readjust 20 degrees to an azimuth of 143. And, all right, I'm going to laser it real fast. Okay, can you see it.

44:36 Right there. And then, you know, it's a suppressed SR 25 as I splash a couple of rounds into this body. Maybe he's laying their prone getting ready to shoot us.

44:46 Maybe it was a kid that was trying to run from the battle.

44:52 You know, in the book where we very clearly paint the picture of these are enemy enemy combatants but this is war and this is back to those shades of gray.

45:05 And they're, they're all horrific shades of gray.

45:08 Yeah, I appreciate you getting into all that detail and it's kind of the same thing. There were shades of gray when you're still in it.

45:14 And whenever you did toss that grenade into that, that building because you had reason to believe that the only people in there were going to be these enemy combatants.

45:22 But, you know, take us through what it was like whenever you didn't hear the cries of only male voices but you heard women and children.

45:29 Yeah. So, Mike Goble, three different mics there. Mike and I, we had been receiving machine gun fire from this little compound. We run up to this compound. And I don't paint it as clearly or as accurately because it was such a heroic moment by Mike.

45:47 As we walked up to this door. I don't know, again, if this is divine intervention because there's no way that he heard the open bowl of a PPM slam forward. There's no way that he heard bullets zipping through the air, not 20 hundred feet per second.

46:01 But he felt something as we walked up to this wooden door and he shoves like it was almost a punch as he shoved me so hard and that energy of him shoving me pushed us both off of this door at the same time as the door just started getting splintered.

46:16 I mean, on the other side of the door is a machine gun, a PPM machine gun, the 76 two by five four, and there's no way that he knew what was happening but he knew something was happening and he shoves me as machine gun fire just starts zipping through this door.

46:34 We find a machine gun positioned on the other side of this kind of open garden area, sticking out the window, throw the grenade exactly where this barrel is.

46:50 And grenade goes off. And this bad guy, this Iranian foreign fighter had barricaded himself with the people that were in this house. And so it's a win-win for them, right? Like this is what insurgents do. They're the worst.

47:12 If he can kill a couple of us and run away, fantastic. If he can lure us into hurting some civilians, fantastic. It's still a win for them on the information operation side of the house.

47:27 The grenade goes off and inside are a bunch of women and children. And we still have about another day of fighting left, but it changes what would have been an entire day of fighting as we clear this whole entire village to us trying to figure out the fastest way to get these bodies loaded up and get them into the firebase.

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48:22 Yeah, and I think you spend, I mean, again, that's a huge chunk of the book. You spend more time on this and I think you do any other individual subject matter in the book, but you do eventually make it to FOB Anaconda and you get word from your command that you don't have to make the truck, the truck trip back out.

48:37 Right. So you're not going to have to basically double up the danger of the trip. They can get you out a different way, but they can, they can get you out in another way, but the command was basically commanding you to not come back in the trucks.

48:48 They gave you the option, which was, which was interesting, but they were basically telling you don't go back out, but you decided that you wanted to see the mission through to the end and you were actually going to come back out with the trucks.

48:57 I think you started with 80 trucks and you were down to like 20 by the end of this thing. If my memory serves me. All right.

49:02 But a lot of that had to do, Tim, with some time that you actually spent with the little girl that was badly injured from their grenade that you threw while at FOB Anaconda. So that was such a poignant moment. And I remember getting very upset because I have two young children myself.

49:18 You have daughters and you talk through that a little bit, but take our audience through what that was like because most people would say, yeah, let's get out of here without going back the way that we came, but you just couldn't do that after you spent some time with that little girl.

49:31 Yeah. So once we got into Firebase Anaconda, you know, you like fall over exhausted. I'm covered in other people's bile and [inaudible] and blood.

49:42 You know, a little bit of my own crap from over pressure sickness and altitude, altitude sickness and being seriously concussed from the ID.

49:54 And, you know, I'm trying to get right physically, which is, you know, working out, getting a few hours of sleep, you know, getting all my weapons right, getting all of my kit straight.

50:07 And, but I'm avoiding the one place that I know I should be going, which is like our little medical hooch, where our medic. I think we call him the ginger nader. He's still currently operationally working so I like protect some people's names.

50:26 And I go over there and, you know, again, grace, man, like, could you imagine having to deal with the repercussions of one of your teammates hurting a bunch of women and children and then you, you work, not just not only did you just experience three days

50:43 of sleeplessness as you fought your way through this valley, and then you get to the firebase. I'm me, Tim Kennedy is off taking a hot shower, you know, getting a workout in. He wasn't.

50:56 He was in the medical shed, taking care of the my mistake. And, you know, taking care of these, these women and children. There's a single sentence where I'm not sure if you grabbed onto it.

51:08 The mom was handcuffed who would share. Right. You have to think about that for a second.

51:14 That was, I mean, again, like my, at the time I was reading that, Tim, I think my son was three weeks old, and the idea of like my wife being like, kept from him or our two year old. Yeah, but go ahead.

51:26 Again, context is important. You have to, you have to think about what was happening in here as this medic is trying to take care of this baby and the baby screaming as he's doing life intervention type things.

51:36 But with that poor woman, every time that she's probably seen a man touch one of her children, it has not been out of their best interest. Right. Like, well, welcome to the Taliban. Welcome to Afghanistan.

51:47 And as we are back to that, but that's a separate issue. And so in an effort of like saving this child, the medic is handcuffing the mom to a chair on the wall so he can better take care of the child.

52:03 This is wild. And it's also wild from her culture as like, this doesn't make any sense because no man would do the right thing trying to protect one of one of her injured children.

52:14 Probably one of them would have just thrown that child against the first wall they could find.

52:19 So when I finally get in there, the medic in his absolute grace and compassion ushers me into finally being to come to terms, not terms, acknowledgement, a realization of life going on and that they're still not redemption, not atonement.

52:41 I hate those words that like the work's not done. And so as I sat there holding this tiny frail little body injured, wheezing, rasping.

52:55 I'm not good with helplessness. And what acts can you do to try not to compensate, but to make a difference as to what is this little child's current status and hopping on a helicopter and flying out, obviously is not the best option.

53:19 So, I stayed and, you know, tried to figure out how I could be.

53:27 And, you know, at no point, you know, this is another fault of most books and most stories.

53:36 You see like this arc and you see like this clear, clear moment where everything starts trending to the positive and like the hero starts making the right decisions and then things start going great.

53:48 Right. And then he like starts kicking ass and saving life and like, that's not how life works.

53:54 What you saw start happening was a trend that still was up and down with with valleys and peaks of trying to make a difference in the right way.

54:06 Like you could say, swimming out in Maro Bay, California, that was a moment where things started trending different.

54:13 Yeah, but there were still me going to Iraq as an egotistical ethnocentric prick and making tons of mistakes and fighting my own ODA because I was too selfish to realize that my team Sergeant John was looking out for the best interests of the team and for the mission.

54:29 And I was like, too selfish to realize that, you know, and then, you know, countless mistakes that aren't even in the book that I that I that there's way more mistakes that were almost in that black book, but then it would have been like 10,000 pages of all of my mystery.

54:46 Well, I think you put enough in there to kind of give us an idea, but it is interesting to hear you describe it that way because for me that that seemed like a hinge point, not just in in your time in the army, right, which you're still active duty.

54:58 But it became a hinge point for me in the in your life, seemingly holding that little girl and trying to do everything you could to make sure that she felt comfortable and just embracing the absolute and complete suck and pain and horror of that moment.

55:11 But then like your story could have ended the next day, Tim, on the way back out right because as you go into a lot of detail in the book, y'all are in the crap the whole way out.

55:19 I mean, you saw some different places where things were pretty interesting and there was like this oasis in the desert you described that in a lot of detail. So it kind of seems a little bit inappropriate now to kind of come away from from that type of a story and come back to the world of MMA.

55:32 But I suppose we should at this point, but this is kind of where MMA and your military world were kind of coming to a head a little bit because why you were serving in the special forces and deploying.

55:42 You're still training and fighting at this point. You're doing everything you can to make sure you're still in fight shape. You're actually sent to Ranger School by your commander at Sip and there's an interesting reason for that I thought it was funny.

55:51 And right after Ranger School ended, you accepted a fight, which typically after Ranger School ends people are trying to gain back the 30 40 50 pounds as they lost during Ranger School but let me read this quote here.

56:01 Showtime brought to head my relationship with the army. Some of the upper echelon command sergeants major and officers did not like the fact that I was both a fighter and a member of an elite special operations unit.

56:13 Now, some people would read that and think why in the world wouldn't they think that was awesome and some people did think it was awesome, but there were way more people that were naysayers so take us through all that.

56:21 It's kind of tragic that that's something that I still deal with today. Yeah, as I'm still working. I often and even right now as we talk and dealing with, you know, asset liability.

56:34 What is the size of your digital footprint with you doing this occupationally for your civilian job. You know, you have to go to Afghanistan or you have to go to Eastern Europe working for the nonprofits that I work for the NGO save our allies

56:49 that I'm a board member and founder of like, I have to go work for them. That is part of my civilian job. Just like it was part of my civilian job to go and fight whether it was for the IFL or for strike force or HTML fights or WC.

57:01 And army's not good at not controlling. And, you know, it's again a typical, it's an anomaly where you have somebody that has a lot of success. And what do you do with that person? And that was that struggle. Like, I couldn't convince them, man, my heart is in this mission.

57:21 I am committed and I am faithful and I'm loyal to what we are and what we want to do. And we can both win here. Like, we, I can recruit. I can fight. I will absolutely be the best ODA teammate team member that you can that that you can have on my ODA.

57:38 And if I'm not, that will be reflected in my NCOER and you can do anything you want with me. But instead, what you have is a high performing soldier that also does decent in this other thing that you can capitalize on.

57:51 And that, you know, that's, that was the struggle, trying to get them to see it like that. And, you know, I don't know whether it's jealousy or just not an alignment, a vision or different perspectives.

58:05 But ultimately, they can never come to terms with, well, how do we deal with a guy that's, you know, live on pay per view and millions of millions of people are watching him and know who he is.

58:17 And we can't control him. What if he says something that is wrong? What if he talks negatively? Of course, I never would. Of course, I never have.

58:26 You know, 20 something years I've been in in limelight and never once stepping on my crank about anything about my service. I've made plenty of mistakes about me.

58:37 But, you know, I can always done the best that I possibly could to to protect my regiment.

58:44 But at the time, the military was like, Hey, you have to decide one or the other man. You can choose fighting or you can choose being in the military.

58:54 And I was okay with those two options. So I did something different.

58:59 Well, so take us through that because I remember reading in that part of the book where you were kind of going to a lot of people for their advice.

59:05 And there was one person's advice in particular that kind of shook you loose a little bit because we've all kind of been there. You've got this big life lesson and you go to these people that you love and respect.

59:14 And then they give you the worst advice possible that doesn't help you get to the end and doesn't help you get to the decision.

59:19 But there was one man that did kind of help you get to the decision and help you with the decision that you made. So take us through that.

59:24 Ben Rios, Ben, I love you. Ben was my first senior 18 Bravo. So on every ODA, every operational attachment alpha, you have two guys per position. You have a senior and a junior.

59:36 So you have the Bravo, which is like the weapon security guy, me, and then you have the Charlie, which is the engineer. You have the Delta, which is the medic. You have the echo, which is the communications and you have a Fox and a warrant and they don't really count.

59:50 And so redundancy of jobs to make sure that if somebody gets hurt, somebody else knows how to do it.

59:56 But then also in like the mentor building of a soldier, you have a more tenured guy that is kind of passing on the trade crafts and skills to the more junior guy.

1:00:08 So as I was the junior guy getting to the SIF, my team sergeant is the number one boss, right? And then like my number one boss is the senior 18 Bravo, which is Ben Rios.

1:00:23 And Ben went to Iraq with me. Ben helped me go to sniper school and go to the Halo sniper team on the record attachment and get us, you know, which led me to Afghanistan.

1:00:35 Ben has been a prolific success and everything that he's ever touched. And so he was a really good guiding light and a north star about how to do something.

1:00:44 And when I was in this kind of this tough position of choosing between these options, you know, he's like, the army's not going anywhere.

1:00:52 The army has been here forever. And well, can you, the army goes marching on? Like, as our song says. And, you know, but you have this finite time to go and do something and make all of us proud.

1:01:06 And, and the army, you can come back, you know, like, or you can figure out a way to, to continue to contribute, contribute. But what I know is that you have a tiny little window to go and try to become world champion.

1:01:24 And think about that. You know, think about a green braid, headlining a UFC card, which of course came to fruition and ends up being rad.

1:01:36 Yeah, absolutely. And we're definitely going to get into that. So you ended up choosing MMA, you chose doing the fight thing for real because again, at this time, there were gyms that were popping up that were actual professional gyms that were teams of people that were getting people ready for fights,

1:01:49 getting your training camps going on, helping you with your diet, the weight cut, all that kind of stuff was happening at this time. So you had to join a team or I guess you chose to join a team at that point.

1:01:58 And he chose Jackson Wink out there in Albuquerque, New Mexico. And so at the time there were other gyms that you could have gone to. And I've actually spent a little bit of time with Greg Jackson in the past before he came and did a seminar at the jujitsu school that I go to.

1:02:09 So very cerebral, cerebral guy, he's different than Wink. So take us through why you chose that gym and why that team.

1:02:20 I was really split between going back to California and going with Dave Camarillo and Bob Cook and Javier Mendez at AKA.

1:02:37 I couldn't go back to California. That's ultimately what it came down to. I wanted to be back close to my family. I wanted to be back close to my daughters.

1:02:46 But I had so much baggage and so many mistakes and a new wife and going back to an environment that I wasn't confident that I could make right decisions in.

1:03:02 That was a big contributing factor about why I ended up in Albuquerque was because it wasn't California.

1:03:09 And when I got to Albuquerque, our first visit there, you know, I meet Rashad and I meet John, like Rashad on top of the world, John Jones on his way to becoming arguably the best two have ever done it.

1:03:26 And then, you know, you look in the stable of fighters and you see George St. Pierre and Brian Stan and Damasio Paige and Cowboy Serenie and Carlos Condit, you know, like in every corner, you just see talent.

1:03:39 And, you know, talent gravitates towards other talent. And like just with John Danner here in Austin right now, you know, the guys that come and train with him, he doesn't charge any of them.

1:03:54 He just gets to pick the best to be on the mats with the guys that he already knows are the best.

1:04:02 So like, if they're not going to be helpful to Gordon Ryan, then like, don't get here, you know, if you're not going to be helpful to Gary Tony and like, cool, get off the mats.

1:04:13 And similarly, like, if you don't show potential, if you don't show that degree of hard work, then cool, get off the mats.

1:04:21 So what it was kind of the same, that's all unspoken stuff.

1:04:24 And Jackson's, it was similar where people just wanted to be better and having come from environments where only the cream rise to the top, you know, like the chaff went away at the wind and you're left with the real stuff, you know, going through the refiners fire

1:04:39 of special operations.

1:04:40 I knew what recipes for success looked like.

1:04:43 And what I saw in every corner was recipes for success.

1:04:48 And, and I didn't want to be a fighter. I wanted to be the world champion.

1:04:53 Those, those things have to have champion builders.

1:05:00 Yeah, and that's exactly where you ended up, especially at that time. I mean, I met John Jones, the week he fought Rashad, and that was when there was kind of that big split, and you give a lot, a lot of nice nuggets in the book about your interactions with John and Rashad at that time.

1:05:12 And it was awkward and there was no surprise from people that knew better kind of what happened and ended up happening at that gym.

1:05:18 So you're fighting in strike force, but then in 2013, the UFC buys out strike force. So now the UFC is the dominant brand in fighting and has continued to beat that.

1:05:27 But all of a sudden you're in the UFC now. So your first UFC fight, you beat, you know, gee, jujitsu, goat, hodger, Gracie by unanimous decision at UFC 162.

1:05:35 But in November of 2013, we get to what I personally consider to be the highlight of your MMA career, at least it is for me. That's UFC fight for the troops three in Fort Campbell, Kentucky.

1:05:45 So you miss fighting on fight for the troops to because of your deployment schedule, you couldn't quite make it work. But here you are. You're the headliner. You're fighting in front of your military brethren on a night where the other military guys have not done so well. They have not fared so well in this fight card so far.

1:06:00 And you're standing, you know, standing on the other side, the octagon from you is a straight killer Rafael Natal. I mean, this is a this is a hard fight. This is a tough situation. But I'm not going to tease it out any further than that because I want you to tell us a story. How did you get that fight? What was it like fighting in front of those people? How did the fight go?

1:06:15 I mean, yeah, getting that fight was hard. So I had rotated through multiple opponents for the main, you know, the the headliner event of the fight for the troops three. And, you know, Leo Machida was the first one. And I was so excited. You know, he was a title contender.

1:06:35 He had been a 205 champ. And, you know, so fighting him coming off multiple wins and beating guys that people thought I wouldn't beat. You know, beating Leo Machida kind of puts me in a title contention type conversation.

1:06:51 And that fight falls through and Natal to his credit, like what a warrior, you know, in this generation, people don't even know who he is. But in in in at that time, yeah, at that time, like he was he was ridiculous.

1:07:08 Yeah, he could knock you out. He could submit you high level black belt with heavy hands, you know, and and had and had no fear fighting everyone title contenders.

1:07:16 And so when that fight finally comes to fruition and I'm in a fight camp, I blow my quad. I tear my quad doing some strength and conditioning work.

1:07:28 As a girl on her phone white walks out onto a track as I'm in a dead sprint and my head comes up, you know, as I'm sprinting and I see a woman like this on her phone.

1:07:38 And in an effort of not like blowing this old woman's hip out. I try to decelerate as fast as I can, you know, fast acceleration from a sprint.

1:07:48 Acceleration is all posterior chain but deceleration is tons of quad and my quad just like is done. I have to put on makeup on my leg to hide how bad the bruising is so the athletic commission doesn't see it.

1:08:01 And as I'm walking out to the octagon after I warm up, I see one of the medics that was in with me in Afghanistan as I was handing one of the guys that was in Afghanistan with me over to him.

1:08:12 And the last time I saw him was handing over one of my bloody teammates and he's like, Hey, I got this, go back to work. And like, we have this like moment.

1:08:22 And he's like, I don't want to let my, you know, it's hard to describe what it feels like to like let somebody go that is like part of you.

1:08:31 And he's just like, go, bro, go. And so helicopter flies away. And that's the last time I see this guy and tell him walking out to the octagon to fight, you know, hopping in a tall in the main event for UFC fight for the troops in front of an entire military crowd.

1:08:47 Like this is bonkers and like talking about emotional roller coaster as I'm hopping out there because I have a broken quad. If you go back and watch that fight, you'll see me like hop on one leg up the steps to get the octagon.

1:09:00 I just rewatched it. I just rewatched it recently and it's like, because I didn't know because I could tell like you could tell like when your shorts came up sometimes like you could see you could see the purple there that was on your leg but it was like, yeah, I was like, why is he hopping up the stairs, but I get it now.

1:09:13 So, you know, Natal kicks me and I in my leg collapses. I literally fall over. You know, I'm a pit hardnosed blue collar type fighter. Like you go to leg kick me. I'm coming forward with the right hand.

1:09:25 And, and then you see me just like crumble and fall to the floor like this.

1:09:30 This doesn't work like this is not compute.

1:09:33 But we saw in tape that Natal, you know, would make this mistake as he started to fade back into the left.

1:09:40 His right, you know, his right hand would kind of come down as he faded to the right to skirt away from the cage.

1:09:46 And that would be my opportunity to throw what would be like a leaping left hook.

1:09:51 So all of that kind of tape and game planning ended up working out. We see that moment.

1:09:56 And, and I do this.

1:09:59 My coach calls, calls the shot Brandon Gibson. We had a code word called Tomahawk where I do this kind of looping left hook.

1:10:07 He lands on the button. He gets knocked out with one punch and crumples to the cage.

1:10:11 And, you know, Herb Dean pulls me off. And, you know, then it's just kind of complete emotional elation as I'm surrounded by fifth special forces group is here.

1:10:23 106/60 of SOAR, two special operations unit co-located at this base.

1:10:28 And then obviously it's, it is a very combat driven base. There's lots of bases, military bases all over the country and world.

1:10:35 But some of them are very particular to combat.

1:10:38 And, and this is one of those bases where like they build warriors.

1:10:43 And, and I'm in the octagon in the center of this hangar surrounded by warriors. And it's just like, it's so, it's, it's the first time where like these worlds are colliding.

1:10:53 And, and it was, it was wild. It was emotionally wild. And also like, right, you know, the words of Ben Rios being like, you know, you're going to go and do great things.

1:11:06 You're going to go and represent us right. You're going to go and, you know, stand in the center.

1:11:11 And I climb up on top of this cage and I'm just screaming to all these men and women in uniform, like how much I love them.

1:11:17 You know, I collapse into the center of the octagon. Joe Rogan comes in there. I'm wrapping my arms around Joe, just pouring my heart out to him telling how, how much I miss every one of them and how much I wish I could be with them everywhere that they go and all the things that they go and do.

1:11:31 And, you know, that was the beginning of what I now know to be like what my purpose is.

1:11:40 Well, it was an unbelievable moment to him. I remember watching it live. I'm pretty sure I was watching it with my dad and just the overwhelming amount of patriotism that was just like seeping out of that moment.

1:11:49 And you could tell because Joe's talked about this before, there are certain octagon interviews that he really remembers.

1:11:54 Like when whenever Rose Nama Eunice, whenever she, you know, just kicked Zhang Zhang Wei Li in the head.

1:11:59 And you know, she said, I am the best in like, he's kind of getting upset and crying like, but he also mentions that he mentions, you know, five for the troops to whenever you were in there because it was such an overwhelming moment.

1:12:09 And shout out to six, six gun Gibson, that dude's awesome. He was so nice to me whenever I was hanging out with John Jones whenever he was on camera and all that so shout out to him.

1:12:17 But Tim, I think we're going to go and leave it there for today. We've got a whole lot more to talk about in terms of the rest of your MMA career.

1:12:23 We have to talk about our consensus least favorite fighter on the planet.

1:12:26 So we'll leave that for guys that read the book or leave that for people whenever we talk next time because we have very similar feelings towards that person but for slightly different reasons.

1:12:34 We're going to talk about a lot of things we're going to have you on later on this summer to talk about a whole lot more because we didn't even touch on the stuff that you're doing now.

1:12:40 But you've got some interesting things going on that we can't exactly talk about on air but by the time we talk again some of that stuff will have figured itself out.

1:12:47 But is there anything else you want to get off your chest before we let you go today.

1:12:50 It was really scary writing a book like that. It's really easy to write and make it sound rad.

1:13:01 But it's such a disservice to all the men and women that I worked with and served with to all the people that have shown me grace throughout my lifetime to not tell as best as I can.

1:13:10 A truthful story that hopefully will help other people in similar in other tough like everybody has these same moments like everybody remembers going and stealing the inner tube and hopping in the river in my in my generation right.

1:13:24 Everybody has very relatable experiences and it's human.

1:13:32 You know so to all the people that showed me grace I love you thank you.

1:13:36 And to all the people that will hopefully show me grace in the future I love you and thank you during the best that I can and I'll continue to fail but hopefully I'll fail forward.

1:13:45 That is a great place to leave at Tim Kennedy thank you for coming on Daunton life a man's podcast.

1:13:49 Thank you man.

1:13:51 There you go guys I hope you enjoyed our first conversation with Tim Kennedy again pay attention for this summer where we get him back on to talk about a lot more stuff.

1:13:57 But before we get out of here we're going to do a quick resilience boost add on to life our mission is equipping men to push back darkness with content that for just spiritual mental and physical resilience.

1:14:06 So here are the links I've got for you today I've got a link to the book scars and stripes.

1:14:09 I've also got a link to his company sheepdog response and we didn't get to talk about save our allies in this episode but that is the organization that he co-founded that is helping with a lot of stuff that's going on in Afghanistan and now currently in Ukraine.

1:14:19 And also I've got a link to Tim's Instagram that seems to be the social media that he's most active on.

1:14:24 All right guys thanks so much for listening to the show we do appreciate it wherever you're listening to this please subscribe rate and leave us a positive five star view.

1:14:30 If you want to come speak live at your event or on your podcast you shoot me an email to info@daunton.life.

1:14:35 That's iNFO@daunton.life.

1:14:37 Follow us on Instagram and like us on Facebook and check out our website for everything else including how to donate to keep more content like this coming your way just go to www.daunton.life.

1:14:46 And as always we want to thank the band August Burns Red for allowing us to use their music for our content. The music on this podcast is our song "Cutting the Ties" which is off their 10th anniversary re-recording of their album leveler.

1:14:57 The links are in the description.

1:14:58 I'm your host Kyle Thompson.

1:15:00 Remember keep pushing back darkness, keep forging spiritual, mental and physical resilience, keep seeking the lion of Judah.

1:15:16 It's a sign, it makes it, it's a virtue.

1:15:23 You'll be revived.